4 ms·

>OSX statically links everything and has for years. When there was a vulnerability in zlib they had to release 3GB of application updates to fix it in all of th

>OSX statically links everything and has for years. When there was a vulnerability in zlib they had to release 3GB of application updates to fix it in all of them. But you know what? It generally just works fine, and I'm not actually convinced they're making the wrong tradeoff. Let's see. On one hand there is more compile time, disk usage, bandwidth usage, RAM usage required for static linking. On the other hand we have a different, slightly more involved linking scheme that saves on every hardware resource. It seems to me that static linking is rarely appropriate for most applications and systems.

lmm 2y ago
> On the other hand we have a different, slightly more involved linking scheme that saves on every hardware resource. But, at least as implemented on mainstream Linux distributions, at the cost of "DLL Hell" that makes releasing reasonably granular libraries on a reasonably granular schedule essentially impossible, as per the article. I'm all for dynamic linking in theory, but the way the likes of Debian do it makes the costs too high.
- wakawaka28 2y ago
  >But, at least as implemented on mainstream Linux distributions, at the cost of "DLL Hell" that makes releasing reasonably granular libraries on a reasonably granular schedule essentially impossible, as per the article. The article is about problems associated with Rust. I think Rust is too new of an ecosystem to have mature developers committing to stable versions of libraries and applications which depend on stable libraries, both of which are essential to making dynamic linkage work. Linux doesn't have DLL Hell generally. That term comes from the Windows world where there are systems in place to store every version of every DLL ever seen, because even DLLs with the same version may not be interchangeable. That is truly hellish.
  - lmm 2y ago
    > Linux doesn't have DLL Hell generally. It absolutely does, especially when there are incompatible upgrades. People still talk about libc.so.6 issues. Whenever you upgrade a system library you can get breakage, only last week I had to deal with that kind of problem (on a Debian system no less). > there are systems in place to store every version of every DLL ever seen, because even DLLs with the same version may not be interchangeable. That is truly hellish. The fact that they've put those systems in place makes it much better positioned than Linux IMO. The implementation may be ugly, but ultimately windows programs continue to work even in the face of incompatible library changes, and without having abandoned dynamic libraries entirely. I think it's possible to do dynamic linking right (perhaps with something like Nix), but as implemented on traditional Debian-style distributions the cost is too high.

lmm 2y ago

> On the other hand we have a different, slightly more involved linking scheme that saves on every hardware resource. But, at least as implemented on mainstream Linux distributions, at the cost of "DLL Hell" that makes releasing reasonably granular libraries on a reasonably granular schedule essentially impossible, as per the article. I'm all for dynamic linking in theory, but the way the likes of Debian do it makes the costs too high.

wakawaka28 2y ago
>But, at least as implemented on mainstream Linux distributions, at the cost of "DLL Hell" that makes releasing reasonably granular libraries on a reasonably granular schedule essentially impossible, as per the article. The article is about problems associated with Rust. I think Rust is too new of an ecosystem to have mature developers committing to stable versions of libraries and applications which depend on stable libraries, both of which are essential to making dynamic linkage work. Linux doesn't have DLL Hell generally. That term comes from the Windows world where there are systems in place to store every version of every DLL ever seen, because even DLLs with the same version may not be interchangeable. That is truly hellish.
- lmm 2y ago
  > Linux doesn't have DLL Hell generally. It absolutely does, especially when there are incompatible upgrades. People still talk about libc.so.6 issues. Whenever you upgrade a system library you can get breakage, only last week I had to deal with that kind of problem (on a Debian system no less). > there are systems in place to store every version of every DLL ever seen, because even DLLs with the same version may not be interchangeable. That is truly hellish. The fact that they've put those systems in place makes it much better positioned than Linux IMO. The implementation may be ugly, but ultimately windows programs continue to work even in the face of incompatible library changes, and without having abandoned dynamic libraries entirely. I think it's possible to do dynamic linking right (perhaps with something like Nix), but as implemented on traditional Debian-style distributions the cost is too high.